Residential Housing

Getting Started

The Sims isn’t just about living a virtual little life: it can be a very user-friendly light CAD program too! Some pretty cool houses and community lots have been created over the years, and the construction engine is even better than ever. Here we’ll give you a step-by-step on how to construct two types of buildings: one house, and one community lot.

As usual, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We’ll touch on the decorative parts of Build Mode, and you’re encouraged to experiment to find a style you like. The lots we show you are functional, and we’ll even give you links to where you can download them on the Sims Exchange!

Before we get started, remember that once you’re constructing a building, the only way to save is to back up to the Edit Town screen. For whatever reason, you’re not allowed to save from within Build or Buy Modes.

The first step of making a decent, functional house is to plan it out in your mind. You don’t necessarily have to plan out every square tile of the house ahead of time, but knowing the layout of the house will hasten what you can do.

Remember that cost is a factor, so you’ll want to keep an eye on the lot value in the top-left corner. New families have $16,000 usually, so if you’re making a starter home, you’ll want to keep it under that price. Of course, if you have no qualms about cheating, or if you’re making a home for a Generation-3+ Sim, you can make it somewhat expensive and just move them in later.

Okay, onto the steps. We’ll show you several factors of making a house here, and comment along the way about the purpose of everything we do.

Step 1: Planning the Layout

Back in Sims 2, the Falkons went through several house generations. My favorite one I made was Falkon Nest v4 (nicknamed Falkon Towers), which was comprised of two towers joined by a skyway that hovered over a pool. No other house I made was that cool, even if others were more practical from a realistic standpoint. But hey, this is The Sims… who says I need to make something realistic and practical? I’ve decided to remake it for The Sims 3, and make it better.

Step 2: Choosing a Lot

There are several lot sizes spread around the neighborhood. Unlike Sims 2 (but like Sims 1), you’re stuck with these lot sizes. The lot size numbers represent how many major tiles there are per side. That means a 20x30 lot is 20 major tiles (40 minor tiles) wide, and 30 major tiles (60 minor tiles) deep. Don’t forget you can eventually build upward too, so a 20x30 lot doesn’t necessarily equate to a tiny house.

Here, we’re going to go with an empty lot a couple streets from the Schultzes’ original house, at the address of 17 Maywood Lane. It’s 30x40, plenty of room for a decent-sized house and landscaping, allowing the two towers of Falkon Towers with room for a decent garden and more!

To enter the lot, I click it first, and it brings up a little information on the right side of the interface. From there, I click the “Build/Buy” button, which enters the lot and allows me to operate Build Mode and Buy Mode with an unlimited budget. Time to get to work!

Step 3: Foundation?

The very first thing I need to plan is whether to build a basement and/or a foundation to the house. Neither is required; in fact, most starter homes that ship with the game have no foundation, and no house at all that ships with the game has a basement. Basements are finicky, as you’ll see in a moment, though foundations are not.

Foundations elevate your house slightly from the ground and give it a much more realistic appearance. However, many foundations can ramp up the cost considerably, and a house with foundations means you’ll have to have an extra step when expanding it. If you intend to have two segments of the house connect, they’ll either both have to be on foundations, or neither. If the segments don’t connect, there are no foundation restrictions. For example, some mansions may be on a foundation, but the tiny guest house in the backyard (that isn’t physically connected to the mansion) will be on the ground.

Because I’m making two towers that will connect via skyway, I’ll need to either put foundations for both towers, or neither. In this case, I’m opting to use foundations; that way I can have porches, and foundations make basements easier to build (again, as you’ll see in a moment). I click Build Mode, then I click the graphical representation of the foundation. I choose to build the brick-and-wood type, and draw a decent-sized box with another, smaller box several tiles away. Check it out…

The bigger foundation is 11x11, and the smaller one is 7x7. Remember that every major tile represents roughly 3 feet to a side, so every floor for the main tower will be 33 ft by 33 ft, or 1,089 sq. ft. Many small ranch-style houses are just over 1,000 sq. ft., and we’ve got that much room per floor. This is going to be a huge house.

In fact, as I think about it, this might be too big. I pick the other style of foundation, which is all wood with the cross-hatched design. I then “paint over” the three rows closest to the streets. I also click the tab to pick the diagonal foundation, then hold CTRL and paint over the two ends of the new foundation to cut it away. The main tower now looks like this…

Now the main tower is a more reasonable size (11x8 per floor), and I’ve got a neat deck that I can play with. I have even more plans for the deck, but I’ll keep those a surprise for now.

Step 4: Basement?

Note: With the World Adventures and subsequent expansions, basements now have their own tool. Check out the Building Basements section for details. If you only have the unpatched base game, this step still applies. Otherwise, there's a much easier way to do it.

Okay, now to do the basement. This is where things get a little weird, and I don’t recommend trying to build a basement for your first house. Like I said before, a foundation isn’t required for a basement, but it makes things a million times easier.

To make the basement, I need to cut out a section of my foundation. The basement can be no bigger than one tile smaller to a side for my foundation. So, because the foundation of my main tower is 11x8 (I’m not counting the deck since the basement won’t be under it), the basement could be as large as 10x7. I’m actually going to make it 9x7 so I have a bit more room to work with on the first floor when it comes to placing the stairs. That’s still a huge size, enough for a foosball table or whatever, like a game room. So, the first thing I do is select my foundation tool, hold CTRL, then draw the inner box to cut out the whole foundation except a one-tile outline…
Now, in the main Build Mode sort, I select the Terrain Tools icon (the one with a pile of dirt and a shovel). From there, I choose the Lower Terrain tool (two hills with an arrow pointing downward between them). I select a square-sized brush and maximum brush hardness to make this go quickly. I press Page Down to drop my camera’s altitude to the bottom. Then, I sink all the ground within my foundation donut. I only have to sink the ground a short distance. Then, I select the Level Terrain tool (a horizontal line with two arrows pointing toward it), and I level the entire area within the donut …

Okay, now back on the main set of Build Mode tools, I select the graphical representation of walls, and I attempt to wall off the entire basement, tracing the inner line of the donut. See, if the basement is lined up wrong, the game will complain that I’m trying to place a wall illegally, that it’s covered up by a floor tile. My initial measurement is indeed off, so this is what the game shows me…

From here, I may have to make tweaks to get the height of the basement just right, because the top the basement should be directly in line with the foundation level of the first floor. Eventually, I tweak it correctly, and the game no longer complains that my attempted wall is wrong.

Further, I can double check my work by returning to the main Build Mode selection and trying to place a staircase connecting the first floor to the basement. If they don’t line up right, clearly I’ve messed something up. For now, I’m going with the cheapest stairs, and placing them where I want the connection to happen. Then, I put down some flooring on the first floor to complete the look. I’ll touch it all up later, but this is good for planning; and now, my Page Up and Page Down keys can jump between the basement and the first floor.

I don’t have to actually wall in the basement at this point, because the foundation edges will actually serve as the basement walls. I also don’t feel like making an underground foundation, but you can if you really want to. I just don’t bother because it’s not like an underground foundation will be seen by anyone; only I’ll know it’s actually there.

I’m not going to bother with a basement with the rear tower. It’s going to basically be one large, remote basement anyway, so who cares. Now I can move on to the next step.

Step 5: Walls and Fences

Four walls don’t make a house, but they sure do help! Walls are by far the most important step during house creation, because they immediately set the limits for rooms, which in turn sets the limit for object sizes and room function.

The first step, naturally, is to wall off the whole of the first floor. I go back to the main Build Mode tools, select the walls, and draw a big box…

Now it’s time to divide up the rooms. I plan on putting the main study and bedrooms above the first floor, so I don’t need to divide that up. Now, again, eye is in the beauty of the beholder, although The Sims tends to give bonus points (in the form of mood buffs) for diagonal walls, which are far more interesting to look at. I decide to make a foyer near the front door (which still isn’t placed), then have the living room, mini-study, kitchen/dining room, and bathroom all break off from it. Check out my floor plan, with my wall display set to “down”…

I may have to move some walls around soon, if I made a mistake. Which reminds me… Sims 3 has added a tool to make it easy to correct massive mistakes in wall design. If you hover the cursor near a wall, you may see what looks like two little green light bulbs sticking out of each side of the wall where your cursor is. If you click-drag at that point, you move the entire wall tiles at a time. So for example, if you meant to make a room 6x6, and you made it 6x7 accidentally, you can grab one of the side walls and drag it inward, making the room a bit narrower without having to redraw all the walls.

Finally, I’ll use the fence tool to outline the deck. I use the Mullet Fencing, though I leave a space for the eventual front door, which I’ll place in the next step. The final thing I do here is select the roof tool, and select to delete all roofs, and I disable auto-roofing. If I don’t do this, the game automatically sticks a roof on the walls I’ve just built, and it makes it really hard to see what else I’m doing.

Step 6: Doors

Doors are necessary to keep a certain flow to your home. Well, not just doors, of course, as you can use open door frames too. Open door frames look awesome in pictures and movies, and really are best used for any room connection where privacy is unnecessary. For Falkon Towers, I’ll have closed doors for the bathroom and for the little room with the connecting stairs to the basement. Everything else will use open door frames.

To access the doors and door frames, I go to the main set of Build Mode tools, then click the doors. Tabs at the top allow me to switch between doors and frames. I first plant the front door by choosing the door called Double Redunda-Doors and placing it center to the foyer. Then, I use The Door from Doors and More for the doors connected the basement access room, and I use the Insta-Door for the bathroom. Note that I’m anal enough to put the hinges at the room corners so the doors open against the walls… that’s just me, and hardly a requirement.

Once those are placed, I click the Arches tab, then I use the Double Arch Prototype and the Archway of Endangerment to connect the rest of the rooms. Note that I’m using the default design schemes for all my doors: I’m going to coordinate everything later.

I know it’s hard to see things right now, but we’ll get some lights in there soon. For now, we’re going to the next step…

Step 7: Floor Coverings, Wall Coverings, Windows, and Coordination

Bare walls and floors are hard on the eyes, so it’s time to cover them up with something more attractive. We now especially delve into the world of decor, though for all my expertise in gameplay, I admit I’m not the best at coordinating anything to anything else. (I used to make every room a different color, so each room was appealing, but the total package looked like vomit from a tie-dye shirt.) It should go without saying that this section definitely is up for individual judgment.

For no particular reason, I always start with the floors. Also for no particular reason, I tend to be realistic with materials. That means, I always carpet high-traffic areas, and make tile or linoleum for kitchens and bathrooms. You’re more than free to go nuts and make white carpet in bathrooms and bricks in the living room, but it’s not my cup of tea.

I begin my making the foyer, living room, and mini-study all white carpet. The bathroom gets a light blue tile, the kitchen gets light-colored wood, the deck gets diagonal-moving light wood, and the connecting room to the basement gets deep blue carpet. Behold…!

“Pyro, are you [expletive] color-blind? None of those colors you said you put down are in that screenshot! You stink!”

Settle down there, Spanky. When you initially drop down carpet, you need to look at texture instead of color. Due to the color- and texture-swapping engine new to The Sims 3, you can recolor and re-texture any surface of any object, including floor and wall coverings. Now that I have the textures I want, I go into the style pallet tool (the button that looks like a painter’s pallet and paint brush). Then, I click the all the floor coverings to make them the colors I want. I can’t coordinate the wood style of the deck and railings to each other, but that’s fine. This is what we wind up with…

Much better. Now to do the walls the same way. The kitchen gets a more decorative wooden wall, and the bathroom gets more blue tile. The rest of the rooms get a white painted covering with a wooden dado railing. We get…

While I’m at it, I coordinate the door frames and colors to the walls, and give the exterior of the building a masonry wall covering, so the house is comprised of gray castle-like stone.

Finally, I add windows and coordinate them with the rest of the framing around the house too. Now, some rookie house designers (me included) have a tendency to “over-window” their houses. Light is good, but too many windows just makes the place look more like a greenhouse with no privacy. Most real-world houses have one side that has few or no windows. Further, any given room needs only one or two windows; you don’t need to alternate windows every other wall tile all the way around the exterior walls.

I limit myself to two windows per room, and only the kitchen gets any windows on the rear wall. The bathroom gets a privacy window, and the front windows are bay windows just to add a bit of variety. With the walls up, here’s what we’ve got…

Looks good to me. Time for the next step…

Step 8: Additional Floors

One-story homes are good for Generation-1 families, but the Falkon Towers isn’t a starter home. Additional floors are needed to keep the yard intact for landscaping, which we’ll do presently.

I back out to the neighborhood, save, then go back in. (Save early, save often, boys and girls.) I have to shove some steps somewhere so the Sims can climb up, and I poorly planned that aspect of my lot. Whoops. Not wanting to redo everything, I decide to shove the stairs on the left end of the lot in the study. It’s not a bad place for it anyway. Rather than use cheap stairs like I did with the basement, I’m going to use some better stairs here to give it a much better look. Unfortunately, I can’t style it to match the rest of the decor, so I just have to go with the closest match. Once I place the stairs, I lay down carpet all across the second floor. Most of the carpet isn’t going to stay, but it’s a good placeholder.

See that 2x1 “room” in the corner of the floor that’s all dark and has no entrance? Don’t be afraid to take minor shortcuts like that if the floor otherwise would look weird. If I had that one tile part of the adjacent room, it would look absolutely silly, and I wouldn’t have been able to shove anything useable into it. I preferred just zoning off that one tile and squaring up the room than having it do nothing.

Although I’ve only just set the walls, I’m going to set up a third floor with appropriate stairs. Pyro’s bedroom—the master bedroom—will be on the third floor and will take up nearly the entirety of it. The second floor is reserved for the library and Pete’s—the secondary—bedroom and his bathroom.

Notice the location of the stairs as well: I have placed them beside the original stairs because I need to keep the back wall open. I built the wall of the library before placing the stairs to the third floor; if I hadn’t, then the stairs would have been open to the library. That is, there wouldn’t have been a wall there, just a railing, which would have been dangerous. (I can see that real life kids would vault over the railing and onto the top of the bookcases!)

The third floor consists of a two rooms. One is Pyro’s bedroom, and one is his private bathroom. Once I wall those, I go and finish off the floors, walls, and windows of each of the other two floors. I also notice I never did the base of the foundation, so I quickly throw some stones there too.

Normally, we do roofs at this point, but I haven’t done a darn thing with the rear tower yet. Now, I have no specific plans at the moment on what exactly I’m doing with the second tower, other than the fact that I want it two floors plus an accessible flat roof. So for right now, I put two floors’ worth of walls, plus some basic flooring just for placeholders.

Now I put a door on the second floor of each tower, lined up correctly…

Now I grab some wood and start making paths toward the doors…

Whoops, no more gridlines! Like real life physics dictate, you can’t extend flooring past a certain point of the walls, else it would get too heavy and brittle. At worst, a person could stand on it, and the edge would break off, causing them to fall! Luckily, there is a way around that. We go down to the bottom floor and put a small foundation in the intervening space below the skyway…

Next I go to the main set of Build Mode tools, and I select the columns tool. This is different from the arch tool, but they’re side by side (and both are accessible from tabs if I had clicked the door tool). I select the ModCol column, and place a couple on the mini foundation. This allows me to finish my bridge. After I do so, I eliminate the mini-foundation. I 'could' now actually delete the columns anyway and make the bridge clean, but I like the way the columns look so I just leave them. Still, I touch up the way the foundation up to match the style of the columns themselves. I also put some railings to line the bridge, just for aesthetics. The completed bridge looks like this…

We’re almost done with Build Mode! Just a couple more things to do…

Step 9: Landscaping, Balconies, and Roofs

The towers have really come together! Now we just need to make the outside of the house—the yard and such—just as nice as the rest.

First, we need to connect our deck to the grass. This is done with a simple set of stairs. The game is smart enough to resize the stairs’ length to match the shorter distance of grass-to-foundation compared to floor-to-floor of the interior stairs. I set the stairs’ width to 2 (for 2 tiles), and place them at the front of the deck where I made the earlier hole.

After that, I go to the main toolset of Build Mode, and I select Terrain Paints. This is sorta like using floor tiles, but they’re free, and they can be made in more shapes than just squares. For realism, you may want to use a small brush with a soft setting, and move your mouse quickly rather than precisely. This gives the path a more “random” look, giving it a little more of a natural appearance. I make a path from my new connecting stairs to the sidewalk, and I move the mailbox and trash can to compensate…

Now I grab the pool tool, and I make a pool wrap partly around the front tower and completely around the back tower. I line the pool with rocks, except where the pool touches the back tower, where it’s not lined at all. I square the rest of the yard up, though I cut the corners a bit to make it more interesting. I keep some sections grass but I sand or dirt others to give it a more varied appearance…

Now I plant a few trees and shrubs, and I paint dirt under the trees for a more realistic appearance. (Sorry about the cherry blossoms there… must be the closet anime fan in me.)

There’s a small patch there between the two plum trees and the fence to the sandy area by the pool. I go into Buy Mode and grab the large Lord Sponge statue (available free from the Sims Exchange), and stick it in the approximate center of that patch. I surround Lord Sponge with a tiny divider (found under the fence tool of Build Mode) and put some flowers in there, then I add some benches to create a little mini Zen area.

Note that I had to do it in that order: if I had done the flowers first, the game would have complained that the little divider couldn’t be placed because it was intersecting another object, i.e. the flowers. By placing the divider first, it all works out, and I get this…

One more thing. Remember I said I had a little surprise for the deck? And did you notice in the screenshots I left an obvious opening in the front wall for the second and third floors? We’re doing those now!

On the first floor deck, I grab a couple columns and stick them near the front door. I don’t put them adjacent to the front door (that is, against the wall) because I’m going to stick some lights there in a bit. With the pillars in place, the front deck looks like this…

Nice, huh? Now I use the eyedropper tool to yank up the deck of the first floor. Then, I hit Page Up to jump the second floor, and I make the same-sized deck, although it’s square right now…

Now I add a railing like the first-floor deck, cut corners and add a door, style the door to be consistent with the other doors, and here is the new second-floor balcony!

Now I repeat the procedure, giving the third floor essentially the same thing. The third floor is Pyro’s bedroom though, so to make it a little different, I change up the railing to make it look a bit better. Here’s the whole front of the front tower…

Two more things. First, I do the decor of the rear tower, mostly in red and flames since that’s Pyro’s thing. I also put some windows on all four sides of the back tower, and set up my stairs there as well. Although I mentioned before that I tend to “over-window,” the rear tower is an observation tower of sorts, so I’ll give it windows on all sides, but still stick to a single large window per side per floor. So the back tower ends up looking like this…

Good thing they don’t have weather in The Sims 3 yet, or my entire top floor of my rear tower would be flooded with every storm!

I’m done with the decor for now… Like I said before, I’ll probably buy some more once I actually move the Falkons in and play with them a bit. Of course, that won’t happen for awhile, since the house already costs in excess of $73,000 unfurnished! I haven’t even touched Buy Mode other than my shrine to Lord Sponge, and I’m over a total house value of $76,000!

Step 10: Buy Mode

I won’t bother with an exact step-by-step show-and-tell here for Buy Mode, but I will take it floor by floor. I decided to knock out the wall linking the foyer to the mini-study… may as well make it one room, and make that side area a waiting area of sorts. The foyer gets a statue and some chairs, the living room gets a decent TV and basic furniture, and the bathroom—a half-bathroom—gets a sink and toilet only. In the kitchen I do a two-tile table with five chairs, a couple counters and appropriate appliances. And of course, we need some lights in every room, as well as lights flanking the front door. The first floor looks like this…
The second floor comprises Pete’s bedroom and personal bathroom, as well as a little study. That means I need a computer, a chess table with chairs, and a bookcase. A telescope goes outside on the deck. Pete gets the usual bedroom stuff, although I also throw in a stereo and a TV for the heck of it. Here’s what his floor looks like.
Finally comes the third floor, which is entirely taken up by Pyro’s bathroom (which is larger than many people’s living rooms) and his bedroom (which is larger than many people’s houses). He’s got a flat screen high-def TV, powerful computer, and guitar up there along with his bed and other stuff. His bathroom, of course, also has a golden toilet seat, so even his nether regions can bask in the glow of his greatness!

I don’t bother putting anything in the basement or rear tower at the moment: the house already has enough stuff in and around it, and this way I’ve got several rooms where I can expand if necessary. Heck, if Pete or Pyro ever has kids, we can just stick them in the basement or the rear tower! Out of sight, out of mind… other than the fact that I need to feed the little punks every now and then.

Here’s a couple shots of the exterior of the completed building…

I put Falkon Towers up on the Sims Exchange, too! You can download it here…